Remember that fat kid lip-synching into his webcam a few years ago, mugging his heart out to a crazy European techno song with lyrics he probably learned phonetically? I’m sure you do, but for memory jogging/time sucking purposes (or in case you didn’t get forwarded a lot of nerdy links in 2005), here it is:

Four years later this video’s still extremely watchable; we should all be so lucky to have that guy’s infectious enthusiasm (not to mention eyebrow control). As funny as his performance is, this video’s enduring legacy for me has always been the song. It’s likely due to my spending the early 90s listening to 104.1 KRBE back when they’d program The Real McCoy and mid-period New Order in equal measure, but whatever it is I have a real soft spot for this kind of plastic technopop. It’s got a massive chorus and a butt-simple house beat and no matter what languages you speak or don’t speak, you just know the “mai ya hee” lyrics are gibberish.

The song, Dragostea Din Tei, was recorded by a Romanian boy band called O-Zone. It turns out their official music video is bizarrely entertaining in its own right, if a bit perplexing. The revolutionary “freeze frame on one of the singers and rotoscope him into Freddy Krueger/Santa Claus/Batman/etc.” technique is to this day underused, which is probably for the best if it’s going to be applied as haphazardly as it is here. Watch:

Yeah, I dunno.

Tune in tomorrow when I reveal, with the aid of 45 seconds' worth of googling, what happened when the song was clumsily imported into the US. Here's a hint: it was kind of sad.